She was what he’d always envisioned as physically perfect. Wide hips, short stature, full breasts, green eyes.
She had the very facial blueprint that matched the women of his past. Her face was warmed by the bright afternoon sun. She
had soft, shiny skin. The corners of her mouth only slightly upturned, but her eyes smiled wide.

“Well.”

“Well…”

“Well”, she interrupted him. “Do I look like a Liberal Atheist?”

Johnny didn’t say anything.

“Johnny –I’m a Neo-Liberal Atheist. Look, I know we just
met 10 minutes ago, but I don’t think it took me two to know I’d have
SI with you. Or should I say sex? Oh,
you’re sooo 2013. Just like the last guy I rendezvoused with. You’re
living 20 years in the past, Johnny. What are you waiting for? Just like my dad—he told me stories about the old days,
when people would actually wait. Men had the nerve, but they waited out of some…silly ideology, so they actually had
some sort of friendship before the sex. If it was bad, they had this incredibly awkward bond they had to sever, so they’d
often stay together, exclusively, despite bad SI. Johnny, don’t tell me that’s
you”.

Johnny wasn’t sure. “But they’re going to call you…”

“Call me what?” she said. “Magnanimous” She laughed.
“She’s mag-na-ni-mus with lust, ah-huh, ah-huh. What can I say, I’m
a big Visceral-P fan.”

“But, we’re in a public place.”

“Semi-puiblic. Inside a transport was ruled Semi-public, back in ’32, remember?Look around at all those
transports. The ones on either side of us, behind us. Just on this level. I count—seven that have their windows blacked
out. Nobody uses a transport’s tint option on their meta glass, when they’re en-route. It’s illegal. They’re
all having sex.”

Johnny
squirmed in his seat, trying to get comfortable.

“Listen,
I sprayed my orifices with Sperm Neutralizer, just this morning. You know—SN
3000. Do it, do it, all you want but you won’t get anee-thing. O-O-O-except hap-py”,
she sang in the most irresistible pitch.

He watched her slow full lips as they wrapped around every word.

“Johnny, I know you’re hard. I have the infrared heat-vision option in my contacts.

She slid her finger up inside the console, firmly against the touch screen on the dash, and instantly blacked out the
meta glass. Johnny didn’t wait any longer.

They had mutually gratifying, wild sloppy sex. He did it with her in every conceivable way two people could. And although
modern Sex Ed had entire classes devoted to sexual communication; theirs was effortless. It was as loving and passionate as
sex could be, and also equally as exciting.

Johnny woke up with an erection. For some reason, he was staring at the calendar on the wall. Was it trash day? Did
he have an appointment? He studied the glossy page, the HD shot of Jenna Jameson. Smoking hot, even though she was older.
Her body excited him, but her eyes, her lips, the corners of her mouth—void of passion, as though she was simply appeasing
the camera. His erection began to soften. There were no dates marked. Not for the month of June.

He held onto his dream, and it made him wonder what a young man’s sex life might be like, in another 30 years.

South of Naked City between the red lights, Industrial Road had a nickname:
The Other Strip. He walked amongst nocturnal vermin, along the seedy street, ripe
with slowing midnight traffic.He was an independent, and independent of fear.
A predator for hire. Confirmed, with a long unwritten list. He carried heavy equipment, with big powerful hands that gripped
like claws, holding anything stiff before the strike. Considered a tool by most mechanics, and clients alike; but he was a
creature of many talents. Systematic, and thorough. He knew about the safe, the one the Fed didn’t. He knew it was in
the basement. He didn’t have the numbers, but it didn’t matter. He’d either use heat, or apply pressure.

*

Half a block long, plumes of smoke rising from the stack; the only reminder that the entire
complex, once a paper mill, now pressed only flesh. Pan’s Haven. What it
was. A private club for consenting adults. Pytho’s
Keep, the exotic storefront where she dwelled above her basement lair, could be seen from the alley between, that funneled
out into the rear parking lot, blind to electric eyes. The storefront shared the club’s cabaret license on paper, and
the paper owners paid up to Chechen partners. Occasionally, at management’s request, solitary men would wander across
the alley,then through the glass door of the storefront, and disappear inside.

Long limbed; sprawled from top to bottom behind murky glass, gyrating to a
seductive otherworldly tempo. Thick ebony hair draped like strands of silk over her muscular shoulders. Her powerful Amazon
frame writhed under soft light that illuminated the sculpted flesh of her tight abdomen, giving way to tendrils of thick black
bush that covered her opening. They found themselves going down with her on the deepest level, behind locked doors. They’d
start to sweat before they got to the bottom of the stairs.

“This place used to be an old mill”, she’d always say, before
she’d had her fun. Before she’d penetrated them. Before they’d even seen the ice pick. “Now it’s a crematorium”, she’d say after.

*

He found the unlit side of the industrial complex, by its solitary smoke stack,
opposite end of Pan’s Haven. Then broke his way in through a locked trap
door. He crawled along a shaft that smelled like rancid sweat, barely wide enough to squeeze his muscular frame. As he got
closer, he could feel the heat. The shaft widened into a large industrial space. Despite the high ceilings, the heat was intense.
He walked through a large room, where what appeared to be a massive incinerator was running. Then he found his way into a
smaller room that looked to be the entry way to a private dwelling, at the bottom of a staircase. He walked into the last
room on the right. He spied the safe in one dark corner, adjacent to the soft light that lit the tall, svelte opening of the
door frame. Then he heard footsteps, and waited.

*

She watched the crepuscular creatures hungry for flesh, as they drifted in
and out of the club, until the neon fought the piercing dawn. Then she slipped down below the steps, into reclusion. That
night she’d had only one taker for the undertaking, and he’d long since gone; ashes to the wind. She felt unfulfilled.
Then she smelled sweat. With her keen eyes she captured the light, as her powerful frame, bare down to her shin-high, steel-toed
paramilitary boots, darkened the narrow doorway to the innermost part of her lair.

“Have you been waiting for me?” she said, her towering shadow eclipsing
him, raising an eyebrow, as he stood static.

The incinerator roared behind her.

He could smell her pussy.

“Of course you have. You can’t resist my pheromones, it’s
just human nature. The door behind me is locked, now. Just so you know. And yes, I have raped men. Why do I do it? Because
I can. Any man can be held down, if he’s held the right way. This gives me enormous pleasure. Although, I should clarify—no
man ever refused me; but when I take control, they usually beg me to stop. I stop when
I’m satisfied”, she said. “I’m exceptionally strong for a woman. I can bench press 200 pounds.
I could squash your cock inside me like a vice. Would you like that? You would,
wouldn’t you?” She licked her lips. “I’ll shove my big black rubber cock so far up your ass, your
eyes will well up with tears of joy, and you’ll sing to me like a pre-teen choir girl. Oh, and trust me, no one can hear you scream. I can see you’re sweating. Are you afraid?”

He stepped into stark light, his eyes unblinking. His face half cast.

“There’s something you should know”, he said. Arms slack
at his sides, his chela at the ready, for her forthcoming prehension. “What you’ve got, you can’t possibly
keep. I’m no stranger to the cage, or the hole. I’ve also been in the ring a few hundred times. Look at my brow
line—that scar tissue doesn’t lie. Then there’s my Jiu-Jitsu experience. Three international title matches.
If I let you put me in a hold, trust me, I’d get out of it. If I was feeling generous, I’d put you in a hold,
cut off your airway, and watch you go to sleep. If not, I’d just tenderize your skull with my elbows, open palms, even
my fists; until I’d smashed every bone in your face,” he said, flashing a smile. “Then I’d acquaint
you with the Strong Arm Lever Bar drill rig, with the HSS bit—right through
your skull. Still want to hold me?”

They both could feel the heat of the incinerator.
The scorpion and the Trapdoor spider squared off.

Scotch Rutherford writes about dark corners between the bright lights. An artist, film
maker, slam poet, and author, whose fiction work has appeared in Big Pulp, The Flash Fiction Offensive,
Pulp Modern, Yellow Mama, and All Due Respect.